Disclaimer:This mod isn't in any ways endorsed, funded, licensed, authorized, or related to/by Nintendo. All characters and elements of the StarFox franchise belong to Nintendo. No assets from Nintendo games have been used, all content is fan made. This mod is not made for profit, or to profit from Nintendo's properties, or to interfere with Nintendo's business.
It is a work of fan fiction, in which Nintendo's characters are put in situations/described or represented in a way, not necessarily intended by the author / owners.
It is made simply to share products of fan imagination, for the educative experimentation of game development, and to pay homage to this Nintendo franchise.

Description:
The goals of this mod is to recreate the style, and the feel of the first Starfox games on a more modern platform to make it accessible for newer fans of the series, and for old school StarFox fans like me.
I plan to take the best of StarFox 1(snes), 2(snes), and to a certain extent StarFox 64, and tape it all together to create an interesting continuity.

The Concept:
However, I'm not planning to do a complete rip-off the first game. That's why the mod is based on the 1993 StarFox Nintendo Powers Comics. But even then, It's not a total rip-off of the comics either!
The story and game will revolve around 2 parallel stories StarFox's, and a group of Cornerian soldiers.

Now some of you might say, isn't this a StarFox mod, why not make it StarFox only ? Or for the more "direct", "Oh no not some fanon/fanfic crap..."
My point here, is since StarFox fly ships most of the comics, there's not much room for on-foot combat, natively. That's where the soldiers come in. On foot mission will be mostly with the soldiers, while flying missions mostly with StarFox. Of course I'll try to let both share either types of missions. I find it to be an acceptable trade-off between coherence and gameplay, isn't it?

The levels:
While I'm probably being overoptimistic, I plan to feature most of the Lylat system in some way or another. Here's a list :

Aquas

Asteroid Belt

Black Hole

Corneria

Eladard

Fishina

Fortuna

Katina

Lylat (Star) : The system's star, since systems are named after the star at their center.

MacBeth

Meteor

Sector X

Sector Y

Sector Z

Solar

Titania

Papetoon

Venom

Zoness

The always awesome black hole will also be featured in the mod. I didn't put Out of this dimension here since, that's not in Lylat...

Though, you shouldn't expect Rob64, Tricky, Krystal, Panther, or sf command characters. But it may change in the future.

As for the original characters, lets just say that I've tried to keep them on the level, and not make them a bunch of unkillable superheros, with messed up personalities, and funky hairs and clothes wielding giant swords. The goal here isn't to overshadow StarFox!

The Multiplayer:
Since multiplayer and singleplayer are pretty close in the source engine, this will probably happen. I have a few ideas, but it will require some research. But I'd like to do deathmatches, vehicular combat, and shooter game modes.

The Engine:
We're currently experimenting with the Orange Box and Alien Swarm version of the engine to find the best code base for our mod. We will probably opt for the Alien Swarm base, since it's free.

The Gameplay:
The mod should feature both vehicular on-rail and all-range combat, along with on-foot action.
The on-foot part will be slightly less arcarde-ish than StarFox Assault, and will borrow mechanics from Metal Gear Solid 2-3, Mass Effect 1-2, Freedom Fighter, and similar third person shooters.
Stealth, firefights, sniping, and puzzles, are some of the planned features, but it may change later on.

The Releases:
While this is far from being final, I was thinking of releasing small batches of missions and content over a few years. You could call that episodic content.

Yes, Starfox SNES was released in Japan on February 21 1993 !
I thought it was worth mentioning that, since 98% of the web doesn't care ! Hell, even Nintendo couldn't care less about it..

Anyways, its been a while since I had posted an update here. I had lots of crap to deal with in the last and current year, and still more to come. So yeah, dealing with crap left me with little time, time that I could either have spent on the mod or writing updates for the moddb profile. No need to tell you which one I chose..

So yeah, I'm not sure I should apologize, since probably nobody would believe me even though I'm sorry about it, and also because this is bound to happen again and would probably make me even less believable ! So yeah, I'm really sorry, but I won't tell you.. ;)

I'll probably try to get someone else on the updates..

However, I'm growing increasingly concerned (maybe too much ?) with the idea of trying to avoid attracting too much attention. But on the other side, I'd like to be as transparent as possible with our stuff. And that's the problem..

Nintendo is usually pretty lax about their characters and etc, but we have no ideas what are their limits. How much do they tolerate ? I'm sure some of you might have tried to ask Nintendo's permission for working on a fan project of some sort, however their answer is pretty weird and confusing. It pretty much sums up to : "we can't give you permission, but that doesn't mean you can't do what you're asking permission for.. And you should seek your own legal advice..". What's annoying is that, while a lawyer will tell me that fanworks aren't legal, but tolerated, he can't possibly know what they'll tolerate or not :/

The only other hint we have is Satoru Iwata answering a shareholder's question on whether they'll harass fans making fanworks : Kotaku.com But that's not telling much..

Do you guys have any ideas on how to get that kind of info, or just suggestion on how to deal with this ? Maybe there's a way to ask them about it, so they don't think its for legal advice or something.. While this has always been a known possible outcome, albeit an unlikely one, lets not risk shooting ourselves in the foot if we can avoid it ! Its not really an enormous problem right now, but preventing something bad is always better than having to deal with it..

And yeah, I can totally picture the kid asking for making a drawing of mario having to consult a lawyer.. What a crazy world we live in.. The day when they'll wipe our memory of things we heard / saw after seeing / hearing them, I'll take a walk to a place far away, and I'll never look or come back !

Anyways, that's it for now, and feel free to leave some comments on the newspost.

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This will come in two parts, because moddb is evil..
Well, its hard to tell how it will end up like. When we get the pre-alpha done, I can guarantee you that the next release won't play/handle the same way. That's part of our development strategy.

We use the classic "Release a little, often"(often is relative) and we'll shape the game based on player feedback. That means the first release might be a buggy frustrating mess but we'll try to address that.

And I really don't like how when we talk about a feature of a mod everybody expects it to be and looks perfect, but from our own POV its not as fancy and perfect as it sounds. Hype is bad.

Anyways, sorry about the rant, I suppose I can say a couple of things about it.

Its 3rd person / over the shoulder. We'd really like to add things like using enemy as shield / making a silent takedown, a little like MGS does, but the code for that still isn't written. We don't plan on using regenerating health or ammo. We'll use a classic pickup system.

We'd also like to have a ledge grabbing / climbing system, similar to MGS, Overgrowth and etc.. We got a basic implementation, but we still have unsolved problems. Such as locking the boxes we use to check for ledges to the character model and not the character's "eyes" as they say in source.

And the biggest problem is mostly how to proceed with animations. I heard we should use IK for making the character grab the ledge, but when we climb, do we move the player entity or we just let the animation run and teleport the player at the right position.. And IK is very poorly documented on the VDC..

As for the gameplay, we want to make it a little more than a simple shoot-em up, like a certain game beginning by "***" was :P (Just kidding, not hating)
We hope to make it a good and healthy mix of platformer / shooter / "stealth" / general action.

Moreover, we've agreed since the beginning not to make SF do many on-foot missions. Mostly given that, the plot line we chose (the comics) is not leaving us much room for that, and also because its seen really negatively in the community at this point.. But we'll still try to plug in some ground missions here and there.

To refine the on-foot gameplay a little more, and making it more than a gimmick or afterthought, most of the ground missions will be played as a CDF soldier. Yes, an OC. Oooh scary! And there's a bunch of others too ! Though you won't see them really hang around Starfox. *waits for people to grab pitchforks and torches*

(not directed at samaxus12 but in general. And yes, its not everybody that's like that. So now that I'm politically correct, lets move on.. )

Anyways, if OCs aren't your thing, just skip the CDF campaign.
I just had to poke some fun at that while we're at it :P

And, I'd like to add that we're really interested in hearing ideas and suggestions, especially on improving gameplay, since we never made a game before.
Just be sure when you have an idea to have at least a hint of the answers to the "What?", "How?", "Why?", and the "Is it relevant to us?".

We're on it. But, I rarely post concept on moddb, because their gallery system is just ... and won't allow to have, like a separate gallery for concept and one for work in progress, or one for screenshots...

But on the mod thread in the Starfox-Online forums under the "General Starfox" section, we relatively regularly post concept art. I think its easier to get feedback from a small community, because most won't stay silent and actually give some feedback.

As for the OCs, well, they're not author surrogates, or fursonas or something. It does feel creepily like they have some random traits from me which I never intended giving them. But, I've heard its kinda usual for authors to do that without actually wanting to..

Anyhow, like I said rest assured you're not going to see a depressive, anxious, half-insane, anthropomorphic animal as a character ;)

Also, I have been working on that post for the SFO forums I mentioned earlier, but, we've made some changes recently and I'll have to show the old version of the 3D models. Along with the concept art, though, some characters are going to, or have changed from the concept art.

As a matter affact im pretty into the oc's and the cdf campaign I strongly suggest you keep that and lately ive been watching your game ost's there all amazing! But the only one that worries me is the main menu its a bit too simple and doesnt really live up to its name its too simple because we all know that starfox is an action game and it doesn't really have that

I understand that you dont have a great music composer but just like the other soundtracks im sure its fixable! .

Back to the campaign what im looking forward to on this mod is something more different than just fox mccloud and other originals (I still like them though) its also good that your using oc's thats why I approve that part...and also one of the most important part that I suggest is the variety of weapons. Though I really like the idea of you putting oc's in the game by the way can you show me a picture of the cdf soldier?

Well, Marc isn't a professional composer, but he's doing pretty good IMO.

And honestly I still do have some issues with some of the soundtrack, but I think he's not really all that interested in my suggestions. But I can't really complain, since its very nice of him to do all this for us !

Though, he might be more receptive to exterior feedback. You should leave him comments on his youtube, his moddb account, or on the mod thread on SFO.

Yeah, and OCs also allow us more freedom than we'd have with SF characters. Its also our backup plan so to speak. The big N answered us with a really confusing letter back when we asked them about making the mod. So, in case of overzealous legal department lawyers(Which I warn that I'd make any correspondence and docs public) forcing us to drop SF stuff(even if I never found any trademarks on the sf chars in the us trademark repo(though mario and co does)), we'd have a "consolation prize" in the form of our original custom assets and chars. Those are crazy times, and we gotta make backup plans..

Weapons are pretty varied, we got: assault rifles, pistols, light machine guns, snipers, rocket launchers, grenades, melee weapons, sub-machine guns. We're also planning in addition to the usual blaster type weapons, to have other types of weapons. Railguns, maybe firearms if we can make them politically correct, a big maybe on lasers(no lasers and blasters aren't the same thing).

As for the CDF soldier, we're still fixing a few things about his 3d model. And it strayed quite a bit from the concept art. But, I'm working on a huge post on the sfo forums, I should post this or next week. I'll include a pic of him in it. Hopefully by then it should be mostly ready.

Yep, that's what I meant.
And the reason is, that, someone once made a very good point that the snes starfox universe was in the future, but not such a distant future, compared to us.

I think I actually read that in an author comment on the Starfox : Phoenix from the ashes fanfic..

We could assume maybe technology evolved differently. And maybe its not been so long since firearms have been phased out.
And given that the CDF are poorly equipped and rather small, keeping that kind of weapon for training new recruits and such would be relatively logical, to keep the modern weaponry where its most needed.

Also, armors made to resist energy weapons usually have poor protection against projectiles in other sci-fi universes such as battletech and others.

Its mostly because, we'd like to have some rock/paper/scissors kind of gunplay. A little like Mass Effect, but maybe not exactly the same way. And most likely not implemented as well..

Though, this is still open for debate, and we dropped most of the firearms, and kept only one at this point, its a futuristic multi-caliber assault rifle. As in, it can adjust to a few various ammunition calibers on the fly.